Can Ukraine—and America—Survive Donald Trump? | The New Yorker

America has been berserk for as long as—Philip Roth: “the indigenous American berserk.” Now we have social media, and it’s more visible than it was before. Not only is it surfaced but it’s encouraged because it’s the business model, right? Extremism, outrage, performance—all of this is now how you make money, not just how you show your resentment and your outrage.

Russian grand strategy for, I don’t know, three centuries has been the following: West decline! Have the West implode and collapse, and then we’ll survive. That’s Russian grand strategy. Things are bad in Russia. They’re horrible in Russia, but, hey, if the West implodes—if the West defeats itself, if the West is undermining its own policies and strengths—then Russia will be O.K. This is your fear. This is what you’re talking about: that Trump is doing Putin’s work for him.

Now we have social media, which is much more radical and disruptive, because everybody is a publisher now. Everybody has a megaphone now. It’s been massively destabilizing, and we’re worried that the authoritarians are gaining the upper hand, just like it happened with Mussolini and Goebbels in radio; just like it happened with television. And it turned out that we mastered and assimilated those as a free society, and now we have to do the same with social media. It first produced Obama, and then it produced Trump. So that’s the reality we’re in now.

How do we keep a free society while assimilating this massively disruptive technology? I don’t know the answer to that, but I believe that in the short run, we’re all dead. China attacks, Russia attacks, Iran gets the bomb. But, in the long run, we’re good. Because we have the better system, we have corrective mechanisms, we have a free and open society, we’ve got a judiciary that still works, and we can do this because we’ve done it before. And we’ve come from the depths. The Civil War! Andrew Jackson! There’s a lot in American history that is not necessarily optimistic for the future, and yet we made it through to the other side, and it’s quite possible we’ll make it through the current epoch that we’re in. And certainly I wouldn’t bet on the authoritarians in the long run, even if the short run can be very messy and maybe worse than messy.
— Read on www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/can-ukraine-and-america-survive-donald-trump